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Seriously, an A7 and Linux for an IoT thermostat or glass break sensor? Linux is wonderful and all for servers and even little routers, but real IoT devices live on a dirt cheap processor in a few kbytes, not Mbytes or GBytes and last for a year on a single battery. FreeRTOS that just received support from Amazon is a likely solution for IoT. A survey by EE Times suggests that new embedded projects are adopting FreeRTOS and a slightly higher rate for new products than even Linux (page 63) while embedded linux still has a small lead for existing projects. I'll bet this pig ships will mono and C# built into it and that is why they pushing linux.

FreeRTOS's best feature is the name. It's a great name that almost sells itself. Once you get past the name things go downhill. Micrium is probably the best documented since it has a nice big book for just about every flavor of microcontroller under the sun. From what I understand if you use a Silicon Labs MCU it's free too.

Seriously, an A7 and Linux for an IoT thermostat or glass break sensor? Linux is wonderful and all for servers and even little routers, but real IoT devices live on a dirt cheap processor in a few kbytes, not Mbytes or GBytes and last for a year on a single battery. FreeRTOS that just received support from Amazon is a likely solution for IoT. A survey by EE Times suggests that new embedded projects are adopting FreeRTOS and a slightly higher rate for new products than even Linux (page 63) while embedded linux still has a small lead for existing projects. I'll bet this pig ships will mono and C# built into it and that is why they pushing linux.

This is something that should have been done with any number of RTOSes. FreeRTOS is a good start, I prefer ChibiOS/RT.

I beg to differ... http://www.micrium.com/page/products/rtos/os-iii http://www.freertos.org/ And, while not real time: http://www.contiki-os.org/p/about-contiki.html

The L series is a typical AT91SAM7 32bit chip that should work with the usual openocd toolset. It does not look like HP is using an RTOS like FreeRTOS which, among other things, has a udp/tcp/ip stack that I like to use on the AT91SAM7X series which contain an embedded MAC (no apple fanbois, thats a Medium Access Controller). The code is using IAR compilers :( so you can't just dive in to using the Gnu arm toolchain without some serious homework 1st creating a makefile and tweeking various files.

The engineers did populate the connectors for the JTAG and provide unpopulated pads for ADC, PWM, SPI, and basic digital I/O, so I would say that anyone looking to get started in embedded electronics could start here, they'd just be locked into using IAR. Also a display is awesome for providing a UI, something most embedded dev kits lack!

Thanks HP, it really is nice that you guys considered the hacker community as customers.

Looks like a karma burning time for me too.....

BadAnalogyGuy, I have enjoyed your posts, and, still remember funny comments by other members few months ago....something like 'I wanted to tell you how bad your analogy is, before I saw your ID'.

I do not agree with you completely. As far as, humour on Slashdot is concerned, I have thoroughly enjoyed funniest posts, one of them being part of my signature too.

Having said that, IMO, I am also waiting for some good discussion on this topic, being a solution provider using embedded Linux and FreeRTOS. I was specially interested in some discussion on Power Saving, Audio and Video services, codecs, EMI and its effects on reliability. And I am hopeful, somebody with good knowledge on this subject could post some insightful comments on this.

To answer your question, I have not enjoyed any web site more than Slashdot (pr0n excluded :-D) and I hope to see still lot better of it.

• eCOS http://ecos.sourceware.org/
• RTEMS http://www.rtems.com/
• FreeRTOS http://www.freertos.org/

Free RTOS has an open source RT kernel as well as some handy dandy how-tos and technical resources.